Madcap night at Cornyation

SAN ANTONIO — Contractually, I'm obligated by my employer to write a column today. There is nothing in the fine print about floating supine for hours, mouth open, in a bath of coconut water to hydrate and cleanse myself after the first night of performing in Cornyation; I checked.

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There's also nothing in the fine print about following traditional rules of grammar, sentence structure or good sense in writing the required column.

So what follows is a random collage of impressions accrued between 6 p.m. and midnight on Tuesday night, inside and outside of the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre, where 300 volunteers, including the nine of The Court of Kitchen Queens and Front of House Divas, to which I lent my limited talents, staged a raucous live show, the first of six running through Thursday night, with the proceeds benefiting the San Antonio AIDS Foundation and Beat AIDS.

That sentence felt long and out of control. So did the first night of Cornyation.

The anecdotes that follow are chronologically and maybe even factually unreliable, and all names are omitted to protect the integrity of the volunteers, unless the reader wants to make a minimal effort to identify them.

What happens at Cornyation stays at Cornyation, unless you invite a columnist backstage.

Some time around 6 p.m., pre-early show:

I'm on a barge with about 20 other people, floating south on the San Antonio River. Most of us are wearing sombreros. We're approaching the theater. Calamity onstage seems possible. The past four hours were filled with last-minute preparations plagued by mishaps and miraculous recoveries.

I stand to get off the barge and make my stage debut when more-than-half-a-bottle of Modelo Especial foams onto the pants of myself and my date.

Times unknown, in the bowels of the theater:

A long-haired man in a duck costume walks into our dressing room. About a dozen men in Boy Scout uniforms lounge in a corridor. Tonic water explodes onto my own costume.

Some time around 10 p.m., post-early show, pre-late show:

I'm walking into the Esquire with two women and a man. The man is dressed for our skit as a woman, wearing pink spandex yoga pants and a blonde wig. He has forgotten his driver's license, required to enter the establishment. He shows the driver's license of one of our female companions, also blonde.

The ploy works. No laws are broken, just a few mores, maybe.

At the bar, my cross-dressed friend accidentally bumps against the chair of a male patron.

“Stay off my chair,” the guy says.

“Sorry, bro,” my friend says.

Some time around 9 p.m., onstage:

I'm standing in front of hundreds of people, next to a man playing City Manager Sheryl Sculley. He's wearing a skirt suit and Superwoman costume. It's showtime, but this is effectively our dress rehearsal.

We're missing cues.

“Seduce me,” I whisper to Sculley.

Sculley remembers to seduce me, rubbing my belly. I collapse into his arms.

Some time before 9 p.m., mere seconds before showtime, just offstage:

The stagehands are upset. Our most important prop, H-E-Bully, is humongous and too cumbersome to push onstage. (By night's end, this wooden perversion of H-E-Buddy will be in need of major surgery.)